twopointouch

It’s always been obvious that watching 5-minute segments of TV programmes on YouTube is likely to increase people’s desire to watch the real thing. Pete Cashmore reports that yesterday, some proof has emerged. US TV network CBS has announced that viewer figures have risen considerably since striking a deal to create their own channel on the video-sharing service. The release says that “Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers.” This is remarkable common sense given the current trend for mainstream media companies to sue anything that moves on the Internet. After just one month, the release continues:

CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%) since the YouTube postings started.

Letterman’s interview with Borat has been viewed more than 1.4mn times over three weeks. It’s not difficult to imagine some of those people thinking, “Oh. Letterman is sometimes funny. I should check it out.” On the other hand, it’s very hard to imagine anyone thinking, “Well, I don’t need to watch that show now because two-and-a-half minutes of it have been posted here.”

David Poltrack, CBS’s chief research officer told Ad Age last week:

“We’re in a position right now where no one wants to take [content off YouTube] … When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers.”

Albert Cheng of the ABC-Disney TV group added that the success of YouTube is about a different sort of viewing experience to that offered on mainstream TV:

The video-sharing site may have capitalized on the needs of the short-attention-span young adult on a widespread basis, but it’s not the be-all, end-all of accessing TV-related content.

“You wouldn’t want to watch ‘Lost’ broken into 50 pieces,” Mr. Cheng said. “There’s just more different use cases that are allowing users to control how they watch content.”

Cashmore speculates that the recent lawsuits lined up against YouTube by Universal Music, Comedy Central, Time Warner and others aren’t so much about intellectual property, but rather provide a bargaining chip to secure better distribution deals with the network. This sounds like a reasonable interpretation to me, though perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of fear and stupidity in some of these companies.